All the night, as Abdel-Hassan on the Desert lay apart,
  Nothing broke the lifeless silence but the throbbing of his heart;

  All the night he heard it beating, while his sleepless, anxious eyes
  Watched the shining constellations wheeling onward through the skies.

  When the glowing orbs, receding, paled before the coming day,
  Abdel-Hassan called his servants and devoutly knelt to pray.

  Then his words were few and solemn to the leader of his train:—­
  “Thirty men and eighty camels, Haroun, in thy care remain.

  “Keep the beasts and guard the treasure till the needed aid I bring. 
  God is great!  His name is mighty!—­I, alone, will seek the spring.”

  Mounted on his strongest camel, Abdel-Hassan rode away,
  While his faithful followers watched him passing, in the blaze of day,

  Like a speck upon the Desert, like a moving human hand,
  Where the fiery skies were sweeping down to meet the burning sand.

  Passed he then their far horizon, and beyond it rode alone;—­
  They alone, with Arab patience, lay within its flaming zone.

  Day by day the servants waited, but the master never came,—­
  Day by day, in feebler accents, called on Allah’s holy name.

  One by one they killed the camels, loathing still the proffered food,
  But in weakness or in frenzy slaked their burning thirst in blood.

  On unheeded heaps of treasure rested each unconscious head;
  While, with pious care, the dying struggled to entomb the dead.

  So they perished.  Gaunt with famine, still did Haroun’s trusty hand
  For his latest dead companion scoop sepulture in the sand.

  Then he died; and pious Nature, where he lay so gaunt and grim,
  Moved by her divine compassion, did the same kind thing for him.

  Earth upon her burning bosom held him in his final rest,
  While the hot winds of the Desert piled the sand above his breast.—­

  Onward in his fiery travel Abdel-Hassan held his way,
  Yielding to the camel’s instinct, halting not, by night or day,

  ’Till the faithful beast, exhausted in her fearful journey, fell,
  With her eye upon the palm-trees rising o’er the lonely well: 

  With a faint, convulsive struggle, and a feeble moan, she died,
  While her still surviving master lay unconscious by her side.

  So he lay until the evening, when a passing caravan
  From the dead incumbering camel brought to life the dying man.

  Slowly murmured Abdel-Hassan, as they bathed his fainting head,
  “All is lost, for all have perished!—­they are numbered with the dead!

  “I, who had such power and treasure but a single moon ago,
  Now my life and poor subsistence to a stranger’s bounty owe.

  “God is great!  His name is mighty!  He is victor in the strife! 
  Stripped of pride and power and substance, He hath left me faith
    and life.”—­